Leaving Cairo, Never Easy

I am writing from the Cairo Airport, in a Starbucks, right next to a McDonalds. At the table next to me is a happy, young Saudi family, husband, maybe 25, in a creased dazzling white dish-dash, with his nation’s trademark red-checked headscarf casually wrapped up on top of itself above his head. He and his two young wives (sisters? one wife one sister?) are enjoying matching Big Mac Meals with giant-sized sodas.

The airport here is the first time I’ve seen anything but grace from the Egyptians – they get along well enough with Israel but they certainly don’t like it. The guards all graciously ask my destination, then gruffly ask for my passport and point me about once they hear I am Tel Aviv bound. There’s not much love lost – the team of young Israeli security screeners who interview all passengers at check in bark back and forth with their Egyptian counterparts about matters of queue management in poor and poorer English. I’m willing to cut them some slack – they fly here specifically for the job, then fly back, in shifts, each inbound El Al plane carries the staff that must wait in Cairo for 3 days until the day of the next scheduled flight so they can do their jobs. They ask the usual probing Israeli security questions, staring you in the eyes, asking simple questions rapid fire, waiting for you to trip up. Once the last passenger has past scrutiny, they scamper aboard behind him, undoubtedly relieve to go back to Israel and do whatever it is they do when they are not being confined to their compound in Cairo, unable to wander out for reasons of “security”.

The Egyptian government deserve praise for doing what it can to keep the Palestinians in check and the Middle East peace process on roughly the right track. Like most authoritarian regimes, they are at hard pragmatists, and while they may not love the idea of a bunch of strutting jews discoing and sunbathing and making fortunes just up the coast, they know that continued conflict means continued prestige for the Islamist freedom fighters of Hamas and Hizbollah, who dislike the secular Egyptian dictatorship only marginally less than the Israelis. So they host peace talks, half-heartedly keep weapons smugglers from crossing into Gaza, and do what they can to maintain contacts.

The Egyptian people are by nature welcoming, with a warm, formal hospitality and patience that makes them the approximate opposite of their Israeli neighbors. But they appear to be willing to draw the line at Zionists. I read an article in the paper this morning describing a widely supported protest lodged against the Israeli Ambassador to Egypt by a Egyptian high court judge. The two share a high-end apartment building in a wealthy suburb of Cairo, and it appears that whenever the honourable judge chooses to use the gym, the Israeli is invariably already there, which means the all entrants must be searched by the 5-strong Israeli security detail. If it’s anything like the dressing down that I received at the airport just now, I might be inclined to understand, if not second, His Honor’s side in suggesting that the Envoy find somewhere else to live… like in Israel.